McGill University

VP Innovation at RBC

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

I'm leading an awesome team focused on innovation that matters to Canada's biggest bank, RBC.

VP Innovation

In 2016, I shifted my attention to our Infrastructure Cloud, SoftLayer, as it was impeding our higher level cloud services efforts and limiting our growth in cloud.  In particular, I aimed to simplify networking for our users by launching a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service.  This effort has been deemed the single most important initiative in the billion dollar cloud unit since the acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013.  We intentionally designed the concepts, semantics, and ultimately the APIs to be very similar to our competitors to make it as simple as possible for our users.  Behind the scenes however, this was an extremely complex and large scale development challenge for our organization.  This included the development of a highly scalable and reliable Software Defined Networking (SDN).  With hundreds of thousands of servers in production earning rent, this requires thoughtful incremental evolution.  This included significant hardware and backbone upgrades along with software automation and new APIs for our public cloud <a href="https://cloud.ibm.com">https://cloud.ibm.com</a>.  This pivotal offering was first made available in beta beginning in 04/18.  Early feedback was extremely positive and has helped shape the offering which was made generally available June 2019. VPC DocumentationI’ve worked closely with multiple $B+ customer deals each of which includes a sizeable modernization effort resulting in new Cloud Native workloads.  However, each of these deals also includes significant legacy “Lift and Shift” workloads.  One of our most compelling enterprise value propositions is to enable a common Virtual Private Cloud network that spans legacy technologies such as Power, AIX, IBM I (AS400), IBM Z, VMWare SDDC along with the more typical commodity linux, containers and Windows systems.

IBM Cloud

Distinguished Engineer, CTO Cloud Networking Tribe, IBM Public Cloud

In January 2015, IBM formed the IBM Cloud business unit which includes on-prem private cloud offerings along with public, hosted private Infrastructure and Platform Cloud Services.  Cloud Foundation Services fills the gaps between infrastructure and platform cloud services (IaaS and PaaS).  This includes a range of multitenant services from operational services like logging,  monitoring and alterting to container services, security services, and a suite of collaborating services to enable microservice development and operations.  IBM’s Cloud leverages numerous Open Source technologies including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Elastic Search, CouchDB, Redis, Kong, Nginx, and many more.  As such, we collaborate closely within these open communities contributing code and operational experience to advance the projects.  When we founded this business unit we made the decision to apply the Spotify development, operations, and organizational model.  As one of four executives, I helped lead the organizational transformation while delivering dozens of cloud services.  My role was split between coaching the squad leaders, recruiting, organizing our squads, and interfacing with sibling organizations such as SoftLayer for IaaS and BlueMix for PaaS.   The unit included over 40 squads totalling ~300 developers. My particular areas of focus was on Cloud Native applications, OpenStack, software defined networking, docker, edge services, elastic search, and an emerging multitenant microservices framework. See the following links to a few of the cloud services in my area.•	Cloud Platform (<a href="https://cloud.ibm.com/)%E2%80%A2">https://cloud.ibm.com/)•</a>	Docker Cloud Runtime (<a href="https://cloud.ibm.com/containers-kubernetes/overview)%E2%80%A2">https://cloud.ibm.com/containers-kubernetes/overview)•</a>	Logging and Monitoring Services (<a href="https://cloud.ibm.com/observe)%E2%80%A2">https://cloud.ibm.com/observe)•</a>	Devops Toolchain Services (<a href="https://cloud.ibm.com/devops/toolchains)%E2%80%A2">https://cloud.ibm.com/devops/toolchains)•</a>	Event Streams (<a href="https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/event-streams)Additional">https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/event-streams)Additional</a> responsibilities included acquisition & Open Source target due diligence

Distinguished Engineer, Cloud Foundation Services

In 2009 I led IBM’s PaaS efforts developing some break through distributed technologies using P2P communications and Zookeeper, a distributed lock manager.  As this technology was being prodoctized with one team I applied the same core technology to the underlying IaaS.  This massively scalable, self healing, technology was used to compete with AWS for the CIA gov-cloud effort.  Our cloud beat Amazon in the test where we launched a 1000 node hadoop cluster fully operational in 3 minutes and performed a terrasort benchmark beating previous world records at a fraction of the cost.  IBM donated this technology to OpenStack to help foster one of the most vibrant open source communities in history.  This transformative effort played a key role getting traditional large enterprises to embrace the cloud. With ~250 developers we contributed to every aspect of OpenStack itself while building Cloud Orchestration on-prem and SaaS products).

IBM Tivoli

Techonolgy Incubation Lead and Distinguished Engineer

Immediately after the acquisition I grew the development team from 17 to over 100 people in six months.  Rebranded as Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Tivoli Intelligent ThinkDynamic Orchestrator, these products under my direction represented approximately $200M per year revenue with approximately 1500 customers. The product is still supported today over 15 years later.  I was responsible for the technical direction for over 200 people across 5 sites on 3 continents.

Chief Architect Orchestration and Provisioning

My primary responsibility was to lead and build development organizations within our portfolio companies.  Since our portfolio companies were in rapid early growth stages, I played a key technical role in a highly efficient recruiting process, personally hiring over 100 developers.  The venture capital arm of the business frequently called upon me for technical advice and due diligence.BorderfreeI built the company’s on-line retail system used to launch the business.  I was instrumental in scaling the development team from 4 to over 20 developers over a period of just two months while working with the business, investors and board members.

Brightspark Ventures

Architect

Within Brightspark, I co-founded Think Dynamics along with two colleagues from the Business Development department.  Together we researched the Managed Services and internet hosting industry from both business and technology perspectives.  I conceived of a software product that would revolutionize the industry as an early ancestor of cloud, then called utility computing.  We prepared business plans and set off to build a company.  My biz dev colleague and I presented to over 25 venture capital firms during February and March 2001. We raised a series A round of $7M USD with a post money valuation of $14M USD. I drove the company vision from inception through and beyond acquisition. Once funded, I built a team to iteratively deliver several product releases with over 20 customer installations. I led and guided all research efforts ranging from workload modeling, controller and artificial intelligence designs to competitive analysis. My duties included system architecture, design, planning, implementation, team management and mentorship, as well as sales support.  I was instrumental in coordinating development, QA, deployment, and product management teams to produce a successful software product.  Additionally, I launched our Professional Services organization; working with customers directly while building our internal processes.The system was a real-time intelligent controller that manages typical web application infrastructure including network equipment, load balancers, application server clusters, web servers, and database servers and storage systems.

Think Dynamics

Cofounder and Director of R&D

As Chief Architect of SRG Software, Microsoft Canada’s 1999 partner of the year, I built a team of software architects responsible for the technical aspects of all our client engagements. I mentored and supported each architect as they played technical lead roles on individual software projects.  I founded, designed, and maintained a highly technical developer community and training course – Combat COM which earned a reputation as one of the top three Microsoft COM training courses offered around the world.  I lead several open source software projects and published architecture articles in various software journals.  I inspired many of our developers to contribute their spare time to these open source projects.I built a sophisticated call center system using COM, DHTML, and Active Script using VB, VC, VJ and Visual Interdev.  The system was deployed to 2500 agent desktops across the country without a hitch.

SRG Software (acquired by Financial Models Corp FMC)

Director of Architecture

Lead a development team for call center CSR agents to run transactions on behalf of the end customer.

CIBC Electronic Banking

Development Manager

Lead several Mining automation projects ranging from drills, to scoops, and underground video systems

Andrew Trossman/Toronto/IBM